Minutes before the United States launched a deadly missile campaign in Yemen that reportedly killed 53 people and wounded 89, including multiple children, on March 15, the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was sitting in his car in a grocery store parking lot waiting for the attack.
The story is now well-known and well-memed: Days before the missile barrage, Goldberg was added to a Signal group chat called “Houthi PC small group” after President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, invited him to connect on the encrypted message application. The editor was included in the discussion inadvertently, a spokesperson for the National Security Council acknowledged to the Atlantic.
For most normal users, Signal is pretty much as good as it gets. Sure, I can set up a similar bespoke e2e protocol for myself, but I’m also a software engineer with near on two decades of experience. That’s not a reasonable or feasible expectation for the vast majority of the population.